Editorial
Web services and process management: a union of convenience or a new area of research?

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dss.2004.04.002Get rights and content

Abstract

Two recent trends are reshaping the research landscape in business process management. One such trend is the adoption of process-driven application integration by major e-business middleware vendors, and the other is the advancement of web services as a universal computing platform. In this paper, we investigate the impact of web services on business process technologies and present our viewpoints on research directions in business process management in the presence of web services. Finally, we introduce the papers published in this Special Issue on Web Service and Process Management.

Introduction

Web services have been hailed as the new industrial standard for distributed computing and are considered, for the first time, a real opportunity to achieve universal interoperability. However, the value of web services goes far beyond merely to enable universal interoperability. In this paper, we investigate the impact of web services on business process technologies and present our viewpoints on research directions in business process management in the presence of web services.

We first recognize the recent surge of research in web services and describe the main achievements in this area in Section 2. We then discuss in Section 3 the renewal of interests in process management research induced by its unique role in the development of web services. In Section 4, we examine the unique relationship between web services and business process management and discuss the research directions in this area. Finally, Section 5 introduces the papers published in this special issue.

Section snippets

The surge of research in web services

Recently, there has been a surge of web services research. This dramatic increase of research interests in web services is clearly indicated by the increasing number of publications during the last few years. Table 1 summarizes the results of search on the phrase “web services” that appears in the abstracts of the journal and conference articles indexed in the three major reference sources—the IEEE Xplore, the ACM Digital Library, and the INSPEC index database. As shown, there appears to be an

The renewed interest in process management research

Process management has been a steady research area for quite a few years as indicated by the number of publications during the last eight years. Table 2 summarizes the results of search on the phrase “process management” that appears in the abstracts of the journal and conference articles indexed in the three reference sources—the IEEE Xplore, the ACM Digital Library, and the INSPEC index database. Interestingly, research in process management shows significant increase, i.e., renewed interest,

The web services effects

We envision three types of effects resulting from the application of web services:

  • Interoperation effect: the universal standard for remote invocation. Clearly, by taking advantage of the two universal standards, namely, HTTP protocol and the XML language, the SOAP protocol enables the remote invocation of any programs running in any computing environment. This allows the communication of any two programs on the Internet regardless the programming language and the operating system on which the

Conclusions

In this paper, we examined the surge of research interests in web services and those in process management. We found that web services and process management are easily blended into a hybrid area of research because not only web services give new meaning to various existing workflow issues but also workflow is a natural candidate technology for web services choreography.

This special issue includes seven fine research articles that were selected among 36 submissions after several rounds of

J. Leon Zhao is Associate Professor and Honeywell Fellow of MIS, University of Arizona. He holds PhD degree from University of California, Berkeley, MS degree from University of California, Davis, and Bachelor degree from Beijing Institute of Agricultural Mechanization. He taught previously in Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and College of William and Mary. He has published in Management Science, Information Systems Research, Communications of the ACM, and Journal of Management

References (23)

  • F. Casati et al.

    Dynamic and adaptive composition of e-services

    Information Systems

    (2001)
  • Delphi Group, BPM2002: market milestone report. A Delphi Group White...
  • C. Ferris et al.

    What are Web services?

    Communications of the ACM

    (2003)
  • D. Ganesarajah et al.

    Workflow-based composition of Web-services: a business model or a programming paradigm?

  • P. Ganguly et al.

    Workflow-based approach towards distributed health care applications

  • K. Gottschalk et al.

    Introduction to Web Services architecture

    IBM Systems Journal

    (2002)
  • J. Jang et al.

    An extensible workflow architecture through web services

    International Journal of Web Services Research

    (1–15, April–June 2004)
  • H. Kreger

    Fulfilling the Web services promise

    Communications of the ACM

    (2003)
  • M. Kwak et al.

    A framework supporting dynamic workflow interoperation and enterprise application integration

  • F. Leymann et al.

    Web services and business process management

    IBM Systems Journal

    (2002)
  • B. Ludascher et al.

    Compiling abstract scientific workflows into Web service workflows

  • Cited by (55)

    • The ON-TIME real-time railway traffic management framework: A proof-of-concept using a scalable standardised data communication architecture

      2016, Transportation Research Part C: Emerging Technologies
      Citation Excerpt :

      In the business field Service-Oriented Architectures are employed to let companies be online (i.e. interconnected with all stakeholders on its business) and real-time (i.e. critical business activities are deployed at the same time that transactions occur). According to Zhao and Cheng (2005) this can be achieved with an IT infrastructure that provides customers with all the information necessary for their purchases, such as specifications of products and services offered, price lists, discounts, and payment facility, through a communication network able to answer questions, give guidance and recommendations in an easy, fast and dynamic way. Numerous are the application of SOAs in the field of the manufacturing industry.

    • Semantic technologies for enhancing knowledge management systems

      2016, Successes and Failures of Knowledge Management
    • A formal and visual modeling approach to choreography based web services composition and conformance verification

      2011, Expert Systems with Applications
      Citation Excerpt :

      A choreography can be specified graphically in modeling notations such as UML (OMG, 2007) and BPMN (Object Management Group, 2009). A well known example is the RosettaNet Partner Interface Processes (PIPs) (RosettaNet Program Office, 2008) which are modeled in UML. The ebXML BPSS is an XML-based language but it has been described using UML Activity Diagram concepts such as start state, completion state, activities, synchronizations, transitions between activities, and guards on the transitions (OASIS, 2006a).

    • Security and performance in service-oriented applications: Trading off competing objectives

      2010, Decision Support Systems
      Citation Excerpt :

      Business processes are typically composed of tasks that performed in accordance with stated requirements. The interdependency between services and business process management has been acknowledged, in the research and practitioner contexts [7,44]. Realistic business processes will involve tasks that can be performed in parallel, or in lieu of other tasks, in addition to the tasks performed in a strict precedence.

    View all citing articles on Scopus

    J. Leon Zhao is Associate Professor and Honeywell Fellow of MIS, University of Arizona. He holds PhD degree from University of California, Berkeley, MS degree from University of California, Davis, and Bachelor degree from Beijing Institute of Agricultural Mechanization. He taught previously in Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and College of William and Mary. He has published in Management Science, Information Systems Research, Communications of the ACM, and Journal of Management Information Systems, IEEE Transaction on Knowledge and Data Engineering. He is associate editor for Decision Support Systems and Electronic Commerce, Electronic Commerce Research and Applications, International Journal of Web Services Research, and International Journal of Business Process Integration and Management, and serves on the editorial board of Journal of Database Management. He is a program co-chair of the Second Workshop on e-Business, 2003, and the 15th Workshop on Information Technology and Systems, 2005.

    Dr. Hsing “Kenny” Cheng is Associate Professor of Information Technology and the American Economic Institutions Faculty Fellow at the Department of Decision and Information Sciences of Warrington College of Business Administration at the University of Florida. Prior to joining UF, he served on the faculty at The College of William and Mary from 1992 to 1998. He received his PhD in computers and information systems from William E. Simon Graduate School of Business Administration, University of Rochester in 1992. Dr. Cheng's work has appeared in Computers and Operations Research, Decision Support Systems, European Journal of Operational Research, IEICE Transactions, Information Technology and Management, International Journal of Web Services Research, Journal of Business Ethics, Journal of Information Systems and e-Business Management, Journal of Management Information Systems, and Socio-Economic Planning Sciences. Dr. Cheng is a member of ACM, AIS, DSI, and INFORMS. He is a program co-chair of the Second Workshop on e-Business, 2003.

    View full text